Another Field Trip, Huzzah

Last Friday, my school went on the first field trip of the year. The weather turned out to be perfect; sunny, about 70 degrees, and little wind. It was also a great time for a field trip for me because I had been up past 2 at least three nights that week. Luckily, I brought my camera along and took some photos of the kids.

The field trip was to a small park located on the hill in town. It's surrounded by some trees and stuff, so it makes a nice opportunity to let the kids get out and practice some of the art skills they've been learning.

Walking to the park

Clara making some fine art

Some other kids I don't know

So the kids were told to stop drawing after only 20 minutes or so...I think the more important thing was to have photos of the trip to show parents. They gathered by class to get photos with the teachers.

Gemini Class

During the photo session, the kids not currently being shot were free to play around. Some ventured out to pick flowers.

Lyn finds some nice flowers

And after that was lunch. The teachers are given some food, but its also nice to hang out with the kids and steal their snacks.

This girl Clara, just about the cutest little girl of all time. I gave her a flower to put in her hair.

Another girl whose name I don't know

And after that was play time. I don't really have photos of this because I was too busy pestering the kids.

Judy running for some reason

The play time went on for a while, I got sweaty, and eventually it was time to leave. On the way out we passed by some excellent cherry blossom trees, in full bloom. Just ridiculous. See photos below:

A close up:
So anyway, it was a nice day even though I had to teach classes later that afternoon.

Teaching Can Sure Be Sweet

When my new kindergarten classes started about a month ago, I got a gift from one of my student's mothers. It was this bag with a jar of sugar candies in it. It's definitely a nice gift, but the messages with it are funny.

On the outside, it says "Bradley Teacher: I appreciate your interest in my son." Hmmm ok.

And here's the jar of candies, which say "Be My Love Sweet" on the outside of the jar.

The be my love sweet thing is pretty funny, but this is a fairly common practice for Korean parents to give a gift of food to the teacher as an incentive to teach their children well. The only problem is this kid is kind of a terror. He hates to sit down during class, and occasionally he likes to punch me in that special area. He is surprisingly strong for a 6 year old, too.

So thanks for the gift, I'll do my best. Or maybe I'll just give the candy to the kid in exchange for not hitting me in the balls.

My Computer is Now Korean

Not really an exciting post, but I think this is cool. I picked up these little colored stickers of the Korean alphabet, Hangul, and put them all over my keys. Now my computer is even Koreanized and I can type Korean if I want to. I haven't yet, but at least it's an option.

And if you didn't notice, that's a baseball game I'm watching thanks to MLB.tv.

Another Lantern

Thanks for all of the comments recently, everyone. I wasn't thinking about quitting posting or anything, I was just a little curious if anyone was still reading. So definitely thanks for still reading, too.

Here is a lantern that I completed (over a week ago now) and I'm really happy with. I started by drawing four circular nodes on the lantern, two near the top and two near the bottom. Then I connected them with some arcs that formed sort of a triangular shape. The colors are a gradation between yellow and purple.

The triangle

The node

Thanks for reading!

Everybody was Pillow Fighting

This will be a short, but exciting post. I was supposed to hang out with my friend Megan who lives near Seoul last weekend, and she told me about a massive pillow fight that was going on in Seoul. It turns out last Saturday was 'International Pillow Fight Day.' Pillow fighting actually takes place around the world on that day, go figure.

After spending a few hours in Insadong, including this tea joint with birds flying around on the inside, we made our way to Seoul City Hall Plaza with pillows in hand.

Me with my trusty giant white pillow

Megan with her whale pillow. Not too powerful but definitely stylish.

This is the plaza where the fighting took place. There was luckily a giant clock so we could tell when it was supposed to start.

So below is pretty much what took place for the pillow fight. It was a lot of people swinging away wilding in a massive chaotic gathering. I think the total amount of people there was in the 200-300 range, but I'm not really sure.

That's my friend John in the blue shirt

I just like this picture because there are tall buildings

A few people were cool enough to bring feather pillows. This really paid off when they inevitably exploded.

And the ensuing pillow entrails all over the ground.

There were definitely plenty of people there with cameras who eventually posted video to Youtube. I found a few with me on them. This first one you can see me at about :30 seconds in when I bust my way through the crowd in my green jacket.

This next video is a little overproduced (annoying) but I make a bunch of appearances throughout. At about 1:10 I can be seen prominently in my pink bunny sweatshirt next to my friend Megan.


So a giant pillow fight definitely is not something you get to do everyday, probably because pillow fight day only comes but once a year. It is definitely worth checking out, though, if you have a chance to go to one.

Drawing Day

Welcome, loyal readers to post number 6 of March. That makes this a productive month of twice as many as last month. Actually, come to think of it, I called last month a haitus month, so that's not too impressive I guess. I'm not completely sure anybody still reads this actually since nobody has commented for a while.

Lately I have sort of a backlog of posts I've been meaning to get out, so I literally have about 5 posts in my head that I'm just to lazy to write. Something happened today, though, that I have got to post about.

I called this day 'Drawing Day' unofficially because it started out with my first graders having to draw a picture of their family. To give them the idea (they dont speak much English) I drew a picture of my family on the board and labelled it. I think I did a pretty decent job for stick figures:

My dad did come off looking a little like Fidel Castro, but that's not too big of a deal. So next period, a bunch of my students had the idea to draw me, I think they had the idea because of the drawing that was left there on the board.

Anyway, here a few drawings from my grade 2 students:

beautifully captured my eyelashes

kind of a melancholy look

But theres actually a pretty funny story to this last one by my grade 2 student. He drew this, and I'm pretty sure he's not really fond of me. So flash forward 3 hours and I have a class with 2 students. I pushed one of the girls in her chair, and I wasn't sure what happened but she kind of sat there crying with her head down for like half an hour (Korean kids cry all the time-its not a huge deal). I decided to take these drawings out to try to chear them up, and I show it to the other student. She cracked up for about ten minutes. Literally ten minutes. The other girl decides to perk up and look at this and she gets a little kick out of it. They asked me who drew it and I went 'oh it's some grade 2 I don't know his Korean name but his English name is Derek.' They go 'Woa,' because it ended up that the kid who drew the picture is the little brother of the girl who was crying. So then we laughed for a another few minutes about it and the day was over. Here's the picture by the way:

So those events made the day end kind of weird, but it was OK overall. I did get this other drawing of me that I thought was pretty good:

See you next month!

Some Painted Things

Ooooh, another painting post. Let's see what it is. First is this painting I did based on a drop of water causing ripples in a surface of water. I of course jazzed it up by discretizing the surface into a bunch of square type shapes. I think it turned out well:

Here is the image I based the painting on:

So next is what I'm really excited about. I picked up lanterns the last time I was in Insadong, and have since painted one. It's really great because I feel like I'm painting in three dimensions. My first painted lantern is sort of a two sided sunset with trees. Theres suns at both ends and trees are coming from both ends.

Here's how the trees interact:

It is a lantern, so this is what it might look like with an internal light:

I have another lantern almost finished that I'll post about soon.

A Day in Insadong

Let's get back to the blogging then. This is a post about an exciting day I had when I went to visit Insadong, located in Seoul, Korea. It's home to perhaps the highest concentration of gift shops in the world centered around one street, as well as art gallerys littered along the sides of the primary street. I knew I wanted to visit some art gallerys as well as pick up some art supplies.

My bus left at noon. I was waiting outside of the terminal when I checked my phone for the time. It was 11:51 so I figured I should get on the bus, though this was the last time I would see my phone for a while. I was looking through my pockets for it once the bus left, and found no sign of it. Oh no! More on that later.

I made it to Seoul and to Insadong fine, but my day was hindered by thoughts of whether I would ever see my cell again. I looked around a few gift shops looking for paper lanterns I could paint, and ran into a Korean man I had met before. His name was Jacob and he remembered me from a birthday party we both went to in Seosan, though I didn't remember him right away. He and his friend David invited me to lunch with them. I said no because I wanted to see art galleries before they closed, but these guys didn't take no for an answer. They said they would find the gallery I wanted to go to and then go to lunch from there, so I agreed.

The whole area was really nice along the side streets that contained the art gallerys.

The one I went to is called Kyungin Museum of Fine Art, which is a complex of about five buildings housing galleries with a nice courtyard and some sculptures.

We went through only one of the buildings and they were hungry enough that we decided to leave and look for food. We went to what turned out to be really great dok bokki. For anyone who doesn't know, this is cylindrical rice cakes in hot sauce, which my little sister likes to call fire noodles. The restaurant even had a great mascot:

"What's for lunch? Oh....my head. Well, let's dig in."

The dok bokki had some shellfish and noodles in it as well as the rice cakes. It was really really good.

A picture of Daniel:

And Jacob:

And me. We got to wear nice red aprons because the food is so sloppy.

After lunch we walked down some more of the streets in the Insadong area. It was super scenic, and we walked to the area where the president of Korea lives, The Blue House.

Here is a picture of what the main street of Insadong looks like on a Saturday:

I bid farewell to my new friends, and I was finally able to do the shopping I wanted. I picked up a few paper lanterns from a souvenier shop, and I also found a really great art store that had canvases, paint, and brushes:

So it was a nice day in Insadong, but there was still the matter of my phone. I got back to the bus station in Seosan at about 9:30 and started (trying) to ask around for a lost and found. This involved something very similar to a game of charades, but with real consequences. After being shown a bank of pay phones, I was led to an office around back of the station. The guy there let me call my phone to see if I could hear it, but nothing came up. He then thought of an old desk where some items like this are kept, and luckily the cell phone was in one of the drawers. Sweet relief!

Korea can be a great place because people tend to be honest about things like this and not go and make a dozen phone calls to Nigeria or something. So thanks to whoever picked up my phone!